From chemical metabolism to life: the origin of the genetic coding process

• Antoine Danchin

Beilstein J. Org. Chem. 2017, 13, 1119–1135, doi:10.3762/bjoc.13.111

• carry over the basic metabolic pathways that drive the pursuit of life. Keywords: algorithmic complexity; complementarity; phagocytosis: reticulum; Turing Machine; Introduction “Man is the measure of all things” (Protagoras), making it difficult to get around an anthropocentric view of the reality

• abstract properties highly reminiscent of the abstract design of what became our computers, the Turing machine [4]. Indeed this machine combines two separate entities, an authentic machine and a sequence of symbols that acts as a program, controlling the behaviour of the machine. The latter reads, writes

• and moves the program support (which must be material, but this requirement is not concretely discussed in the abstract formulation of the Turing machine) to reach its symbols. Importantly, exactly as in the living cell, where there is no specific instruction (no design) to tell it to start living, in